Women Played a More Important Role in Producing Medieval Manuscripts Than Previously Thought
New research suggests that women were the scribes of at least 1.1 percent of manuscripts in the Latin West between 400 and 1500 C.E.
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During the Middle Ages, it was common to find monks huddled over their desks, painstakingly copying manuscripts by hand. But women played an important role in this work, too, according to a new study published this month in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
Female scribes were responsible for producing at least 110,000 handwritten manuscripts between 400 and 1500 C.E. in the “Latin West,” or the Roman Catholic parts of Europe, researchers find. That represents roughly 1.1 percent of the total 10 million manuscripts produced during that period.
That may seem like a small proportion, but the researchers say their findings are likely an underestimate. More female scribes from this period have likely yet to be identified.
Though past research has turned up a handful of medieval manuscripts penned by women, the study provides “statistical support for the often-overlooked contributions of female scribes over time,” says study co-author Åslaug Ommundsen, a scholar at the University of Bergen in Norway, to Hyperallergic’s Isa Farfan.
Before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the middle of the 15th century, books had to be written by hand. Producing multiple versions of the same book meant a human scribe had to sit down and copy the text, letter by letter.
For years, historians have believed that monks were primarily responsible for this work. But the new paper shines a light on the previously overlooked role that women played in copying manuscripts.
To quantify women’s contributions, the researchers turned to colophons, or short, signature-like blurbs typically found at the end of manuscripts that noted the date, location and person responsible for making the copy. For example, one woman wrote: “I, Birgitta Sigfurs’s daughter, nun in the monastery Munkeliv at Bergen wrote this psalter with initials, although not as well as I ought. Pray for me, a sinner.” Others wrote colophons using terms like “scriptrix,” which means female scribe, or “soror,” which means sister.
They analyzed 23,774 colophons from a Benedictine catalog written between 800 and 1626 C.E. Of those, roughly 254, or 1.1 percent, were written by women. They then used this figure to extrapolate how many of the total manuscripts produced during the Middle Ages were copied by women.
Since roughly 75,000 of the 10 million medieval manuscripts have survived to modern times, the researchers posit that around 8,000 manuscripts copied by women are still in existence.
The researchers also spotted a curious trend in the proportion of women working as scribes. Around the year 1400 C.E., they noticed that the number of female colophons rose significantly. This spike likely corresponds to an increased demand for books written in vernacular, or local languages.
“Women may have found more opportunities to participate in scribal work as the demand for accessible, non-Latin texts grew,” writes Tibi Puiu for ZME Science. “Necessity trumped prejudice.”
The full extent of women’s contributions is still unknown, the researchers say. Some female scribes may have intentionally hidden their gender, while others may have written their names in a document’s margins, rather than in the colophon. Others may simply have chosen not to identify themselves at all.
“Our investigation strongly suggests that there are female book-producing communities not yet identified or at the very least that there must have been many more female scribes than what has hitherto been accounted for,” the researchers write in the paper. “Our study should be seen as a first step, opening new perspectives.”
